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When I first started at Cockroach Labs, the founders and I had a candid conversation about diversity. Studies have shown that diverse companies have a greater likelihood of success through higher employee performance and financial returns [2015 McKinsey report]. We agreed that it was important for us to attract a diverse workforce and concluded that the best way to do so was through creating an inclusive environment. In addition to internal initiatives, we set out on a mission to remove bias from our interview process or more realistically, challenge the bias that our interviewers face when assessing candidates.

Lindsay Grenawalt

September 7, 2017

As a CockroachDB Tech Writer, when I document a new feature, generally, I first try to learn the business value behind it, then I test the feature thoroughly, and then I try to write up concise, informative guidance for users. Sometimes, the business value and usage aren’t unique to CockroachDB (it’s a SQL database, after all, and SQL has been around for a while). Other times, I get to document capabilities so novel and powerful that straight-up user documentation just doesn’t seem enough.

Consistent, Distributed, Incremental Backup: Pick Three Almost all widely used database systems include the ability to backup and restore a snapshot of their data. The replicated nature of CockroachDB’s distributed architecture means that the cluster survives the loss of disks or nodes, and yet many users still want to make regular backups. This led us to develop distributed backup and restore, the first feature available in our CockroachDB Self-hosted offering.

The design team at Cockroach Labs recently doubled in size (Hooray!). During the hiring process, I got many questions about the company culture, specific projects that a new product designer would be working on, and of course, personal growth. The most common question, however, was surprisingly about what exactly a product designer does. Product design encompasses a wide range of responsibilities. Depending on the person and their company, the typical day of a product designer can vary quite a bit. Some write thorough code for their mockups, while others write clear, witty copy. Some craft pixel-perfect icons, while others excel at prototyping animations and user flows. If you're attracted to working at startups like me, then you're probably drawn to wearing many hats. Since resources are scarce, product designers sometimes manage projects, conduct interviews, create mockups, and take on prototyping. And if you're working on a product for which you aren't the primary the user (like a database), one skill that's crucial to success is the ability to leverage knowledge from your fellow coworkers so they can help you arrive at great solutions. A product designer at Cockroach Labs has three main responsibilities: research, translation and facilitation.

Rounding in Go is hard to do correctly. That is, given a float64, truncate the fractional part (anything right of the decimal point), and add one to the truncated value if the fractional part was >= 0.5. This problem doesn't come up often, but it does enough that as of this writing, the second hit on Google for golang round is a closed issue from the Go project, which declined to add a Round function to the math package. That issue also includes many community contributions about ways to round.

Update on June 17, 2020: since initially publishing this post in 2017, we’ve now completed full support for Active Record. Also, CockroachDB does now fully support Common Table Expressions. In our first blog post on ORM support, Cuong Do detailed how we provided support for Hibernate, a full-featured Java ORM, in CockroachDB. He also discussed our general motivation for providing support for popular ORMs in CockroachDB: to make it as easy as possible for developers to build applications with CockroachDB using a variety of languages and frameworks.

The pgwire module handles the communication with the client application, and receives the query from the client. The SQL text is analyzed and transformed into an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). This is then further analyzed and transformed into a logical query plan which is a tree of relational operators like filter, render (project), join. Incidentally, the logical plan tree is the data reported by the EXPLAIN statement. The logical plan is then handed up to a back-end layer in charge of executing the query and producing result rows to be sent back to the client.

A version of this blog post was originally published on May 1, 2017 and has been modified to provide the newest information available. With the recent 1.0 release, CockroachDB is now a production-ready database. 1.0 showcases the core capabilities of CockroachDB, while also offering users improved performance and stability with a cloud-native architecture that flexibly supports all manner of cloud deployments. It encompasses the core features that allow our users to run CockroachDB successfully in production. Now that the dust has settled on our 1.0 release, I wanted to share how we defined our target use case and dive into the actual product features that support running that use case in production.

Join the Cockroach Labs founders for an unscripted conversation about the dirty details building 1.0 and in achieving consensus across three co-founders. What do they wish they could have made it into the 1.0 release? What are they most excited about in this production-ready release? And what happens when they disagree with each other?

Jessica Edwards

May 11, 2017